skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dislike facebook myself and for a lot of the same reasons but this guy is dead wrong that no one would miss it.

If facebook disappeared overnight, it would cause millions of people to come unglued. People are addicted to the connected/sharing nature of facebook and the level of withdrawal would be dangerous.
Is Google Talk a LinkedIn killer?
But you can eliminate that interface too, with sufficiently advanced driverless cars that know (from e.g. your habits or calendar) where you want to go.
No, they're the only major company that has a huge and scarily-loyal fan-base who are willing to rationalize major screw-ups as some kind of visionary strategic decision.

And they didn't innovate - they replaced a nicely-functioning product with a broken imitation.
The Xbox section is missing a lot of information. Microsoft makes money on gold live subscriptions, but also makes about $10 for every retail xbox game sold, and much more from high profile first party titles like Halo and Gears of War. Afaik, the Xbox hardware has also been profitable for quite sometime (at least 2-3 years.)
Really, the problem is that a live presentation and an online slide deck all by itself are two very different things, and trying to make a single slide deck that works for both is pretty much doomed for failure.
Arduino & USB = Dangerous
I got one the first day I could order in the UK with a US English keyboard, and I love it. Running ubuntu. I was on a two year old macbook pro before. I'm not a screen connoisseur, but it's non-glare yet bright. I like it. But the vertical resolution is lower than on older thinkpads. Fewer lines of code.
Patrick, he does write "it’s worth noting that we are talking about people that want to live in vans."

I was a lower middle class kid with a lackluster middle class education and good manners so I was able to scrape by on $17K a year and "live" off my motorcycle and later out of my truck in between stints at a lodge in back country Alaska. It was privileged. Sure. And there were before the crash many of us doing it. None of us had any responsibilities. Why the disdain? No one ever claimed it was more than it was. There's a leisure class at both ends of the economic spectrum. For the most part, there were very few Trustafarians. We were middle class kids who wanted to climb/write novels/surf/snowboard/insert your interest here.

We all sacrificed future income for those days. No need for disdain. We all make our own choices.

[EDIT] Here's a current stream of a couple living the dream: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Drive-Nacho-Drive/21838885820...
October #NYFTS Meetup
Everyone should program, or programming is hard? Both
I found the insane guy immensely entertaining.
I think people occasionally submit present-tense articles for past events to try to make some very specific kind of point, sort of like a "have you forgotten?".

It's a bit bewildering and I'm not totally sure I understand the point.

The one that comes to mind recently was a 6 September 2012 submission with headline "Swedish rape warrant for Wikileaks' Assange cancelled" linking to the article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11049316 from 2010.
never thought i'd get a chance to promote foster hunting on hacker news, but et voila: the polar opposite of this article – something that would inspire you to want to live in a van – can be found on this fantastic blog: http://www.arestlesstransplant.com
As a 21 year old, it took me a second to realize that was Steve Jobs. He looks so young.
AutoHotkey to the rescue.
I think he took this way too far but I can get behind the core of it. I'm especially dismayed by touchscreen interfaces in cars. Give me DIALS and KNOBS. They are SO MUCH BETTER than a touchscreen because I can easily use them accurately without taking my eyes off the road. No amount of touchscreen haptic feedback will ever make up for this.

If you must embrace high-tech in the car cockpit, voice control is fine (if it works well), but touchscreens are horrible in this environment.
I agree, but I really meant that there's no need for a link to Betteridge's Law in every single post involving a question mark, it is tiresome.
It sounds like you're saying that it seems like it should be diagnostic vaguely of "success" or "survival".

Perhaps it might have negative values as well. Part of the trick seems to be to turn off critical thinking for awhile, not reconsidering your assumptions, turning off self-doubt or sounding confident, or being strategically vague. Skills I would value in a salesperson, but not necessarily an engineer.

Since all of these ideas are introspective and the output variable is unspecific I don't see a good way to make a decision about the usefulness of this test.
Why is this an invalid approach? If you have an agreed-upon OS installation, you've got at least several hundred megabytes of binary data from which you can extract sequences for a lookup dictionary. To compress, you locate largest substrings of the input that also appear somewhere in the OS data. For example, you might find that bytes 1000-2000 of the input data are the same as bytes 4528-5528 of /bin/ls. Then you just need a program that can extract this byte range from /bin/ls and fill it in at the appropriate place.

Of course, it isn't a given that you will be able to find a sufficiently large overlapping substring in the OS binary data. And it may not be allowed to assume an agreed-upon OS installation, although it was OK to assume that gunzip was available. And finally, doing this sort of largest-overlapping-substring search could be very very slow.

The real key here is that the challenge is about compressing one specific random file. It's clearly impossible to write a compressor that can represent ANY sequence of N bytes in fewer than N bytes including the decompressor. But this challenge is constrained to reconstructing a single input file, not handling arbitrary inputs. If the input files are random, and you keep asking for them, there's a tiny chance you'll get one with enough repetition that even gzip could compress it. If you can key against a large set of reference data, your odds improve significantly.

So, I don't know if this is a practical approach given the restrictions of the contest, the cost of entering, and the expected payoff, but I would say that if it is plausible to use a large body of OS files for lookup, this could be a winnable challenge.
Password Must Be Over 18770 Characters and Not Any of Previous 30689 Passwords
If you talk about this approach, the first commet that comes to mind is Hamner-Brown. (Yeah, it's fictional. Still, it's the archetype of that strategy :)
How airbnb lost me as a customer
I don't have a blog where this story would be appropriate, but since I know airbnb founders/investors read HN, I figure my story might be valuable to them. This is how my first experience with airbnb is also going to be my last.

I recently rented out my apartment for a 2 week stay. With my nearly $3,000 payment being held by airbnb, I received an email asking me to "send in a scanned copy of your government issued ID and a copy of a utility bill". No form to do so, just the vague "send". I'm not really comfortable sending as much personal info as my drivers license contains (height, weight, eye color, DL number, photo) especially over unencrypted email, and when this requirement wasn't mentioned before listing my space.

Here is where they lose me as a customer though- I snapped a photo of a utility bill and responded to their email. Two days go by, my payment is still 'pending' now several days after the guest has arrived. I send a second email inquiring if the photo was ok (I don't have a scanner handy) and why they still haven't paid me, and get no response. More days go by with airbnb holding my payment, and I try to use their live chat. Live chat fails silently in firefox (clicking the button does nothing). I try in chrome and it tells me everyone is busy. Try again later and it opens a window... then 30 seconds later tells me everyone is busy and to email my request.

Finally, now 9 days after my guest arrived, I receive another email from airbnb which ignores all my previous messages and tells me to once again "send" them scans of gov't id and utility bill. Apparently my only option to get them to release my funds is to send highly personal information over unencrypted email, a requirement which was never made clear when I made my listing.

Airbnb seems like a great idea with an ideal set of founders and backers, but unexpected requirements and terrible customer support have turned me off their site.
This. I still have all the buttons a non-idrive 3 series has has, and typically turn off the screen when I don't need the additional features. But it is really nice to have navigation, bmw assist, and all the additional features that come along with iDrive when I want them. I have a hard time understanding the downside.
Great time to be living. My wife and I sold most of our stuff and have been living nomadically the last 4 months while continuing to work full time. Though we are in an Airstream, not a van.

Started in Vermont and currently beach front on the Oregon coast. Truly awesome

http://www.watsonswander.com/

It is turning out to be just slightly cheaper than when we owned a house. Averaged $27 a night the last two months for campground fees and $20 a day on gas.
This guy goes one step further; living in a Honda Civic:

http://www.quora.com/Would-becoming-homeless-be-a-good-strat...
Let's simplify the top instructions the same way the bottom has been. The bottom is a high level view, the top is from a low level view. From the high view it would be even simpler than the bottom, owner approaches, enters, turns on. No interfacing required until you get in the thing and press the button.
Allstate Exteriors- London Ohio Roofing | Central Ohio Roof
This really surprised me... and then it didn't. When I first read about the CW ad I figured oh, it'll be a little 320x240 screen with a battery and wireless unit attached, some simple bios-type display and wireless driver, etc.

But I imagine as they were looking at options, they found they were paying for essentially 3/4 of a phone, and it probably would run them more to design and assemble this custom solution than it would to just buy 10,000 surplus phone skeletons with everything included and write a simple Android app.

That said, it's pretty insane that this thing will make calls and everything. I wonder what kind of restrictions are on the SIMs - time, data, minutes?
Is there any reason for that to be a tinyurl link?
Well, the App Store was accidental, for example. I have no evidence of this, except that it would have been fairly obvious to Apple that, having had the iTunes Store, and sold apps this way before, letting any developer make apps would be great.
He's using the waste heat from an esoteric jet engine design to warm up his tea. Because he can.
I'm getting a little disappointed with astronomical events. The let downs have greatly outnumbered those that have delivered.

DISAPPOINTMENTS:

Comet Kohoutek

Halley's Comet

Every meteor shower I've watched: at least an order of magnitude less than they said I might see.

SUCCESSES:

Comet West: this one delivered. It wasn't a big comet, but it was bright and beautiful in the dawn.

1975 nova in Cygnus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V1500_Cygni

FALSE ALARM:

I saw a very bright star-like object, fairly low in the sky. It was around magnitude -4 or -5, much brighter than any normal star. This was in the east, and it was around 10pm, so it could not be Venus. I watched for several minutes and could detect no movement. I grabbed some binoculars for a closer look. It still appeared as a point source, and still showed no movement.

I watched for a bit more and it finally started showing movement, ruling out my guess that I was seeing a supernova.

Turns out it was a B-52, very far away, coming straight at me with its landing light on. Those lights are quite powerful, and you can see them when the plane is a couple hundred miles away or more. We lived about 5 miles from the runways at Castle Air Force Base, and from where the plane was the angular distance between me and the runway from the plane's point of view would have been maybe half a degree, so it's not surprising that there would be an occasional B-52 coming right at me.
It may be that finding that algorithm is theoretically possible but impractical. I'm going to guess that for a random bit stream that it's impractical and would require huge computing resources, cost, and time.
I concur. This is one of my absolute favorite blogs.
Correct wikipedia link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olney's_lesions

edit: looks like the apostrophe is getting stripped
It's lazy and passive-aggressive, the implication being, "figure out why this is relevant."
Think about it as identifying patterns. You can always remove chunks of the original file and then simply re-add them with instruction as following: "Add pattern 23989898989 to 234d, 387th and 1028th point of this file." If your pattern is big relative to the file size and repeats often, you will save space. However, if the file is truly random, the larger the pattern, the less frequently you will see it. Very large patterns will be seen only once. Very small patterns will require more information to encode their place than you're saving by removing them from the file.
Productivity tips for internet startups
While we are on topic, can someone shed some light on the reason behind Mac OSX spelling corrector being so inferior to the one used in Microsoft products? I'm a big fan of Apple overall, but I find myself turning to MS Word to write what I really care about. Being in English or Spanish, Microsoft's corrector is light years ahead of Apple.
Awesome link, but already seen it on reddit yesterday. HUH
Haven't you realized that Google gets all the blame for problems created by the carriers? It's the same old blame game that happened with Microsoft for problems created by their vendors.
right, ok, but on what side of line are you standing?
Ubuntu in the Cloud
I'm not sure if the allure is necessarily the bohemian way of feeling poor. I think much of it has to do with the minimalism of the experience. The ability to pack up and move on at a moments notice has 'starting over' feel to it, which can be quite nice. Kind of like refactoring crufty code.
Shifting from the compressed file to the decompressor is totally allowed. What is not is shifting it to the filesystem. For example, he could have named the decompressor file with the first 512 bytes of data and then the decompressor concatenates the filename with the rest of the data. However the filesystem is still storing more data than it was before.
The butterfly keyboard is one of those fascinating little cul-de-sacs of computing history: a brilliant design that never went anywhere. But it sure made an impression; to this day I can't think of ThinkPads without thinking of it.
When I worked in Palo Alto and lived in SF, the daily commute felt tolerable for three days of the week and then became intolerable for the last two days of the week. After quitting my job and getting a trailer to travel the country, I figured out that a solution to the commute would have been to buy a trailer/van while in SV and park it permanently in one of the huge lots at work and overnight there when I didn't feel like driving back to SF. Like vans, some trailers, like Airstreams or vintage "canned hams", don't depreciate if taken care of.
I have used both of those, and the implementation is horrendous. It's nothing like the smooth feeling on a thinkpad
YouTube EDU brings learners & educators together in a global video classroom
Seems unlikely. There is a huge paradigm shift to touch, it doesn't really make sense go back to non touch input devices.
It would seem to me that you're in exact agreement with what I said, if not for the fact that you started with "This is a myth." What exactly is it that you disagree with?
"Erlang for Haskell" or "Akka for Haskell" I believe the goal is. It's going to be cool.
Universal XSS (UXSS) in Opera
RP Brings 3D Printing to the Design Office [1996]
>>Kind of like refactoring crufty code.

I think you mean "deleting code and starting from scratch". Refactoring code involves making changes to existing code in order to optimize it - I don't think it's analogous to packing up and moving on.
Or going to the bathroom, driving their cars, sleeping... For example, I've only seen the Godfather once. My electric toothbrush, on the other hand? I use that every day! Take that Coppola!
I think Jobs himself proved that software isn't art, and "hackers" are not artistes. I submit the following conjecture: The complaints about the app store approval process would be nothing compared to the shitstorm if Apple started blocking songs and films from iTunes. Remember, Jobs is the one who, if he had gotten his way, would make all software go through a central committee before you could use it. ¡Viva la Revolución! Also, eff the Beatles. Put on some Wilson Pickett or Motown, or your pick of their better contemporaries.
I think the reason most people don't see this intuitively, is because pigeonhole principle explanation doesn't deal with the mechanism of compression they have in mind. It's just a general statement of impossibility. To give them intuition about it, you would need to show why exactly the compression approach they have in mind won't work.
Granted I've been in campgrounds the last few months and not near many residential neighborhoods, but my experience is that its more trouble than it is worth.

We have a wifi extender on the roof of our travel trailer. Finding an open wifi is fairly rare these days. Even campground offered wifi is hit or miss on speed. Our 3g data card rocks. 20gig a month gives us a little leeway on streaming. We make due with local news and a stash of Seinfeld and Sopranos.
For client sites, we end up fighting to override Bootstrap.

Could you describe this more? I didn't really see much about it in your blog post.
Campers (and I'd imagine RVs) are much the same. Once they hit 15-20 years old, as long as long as the interior is decent and you keep them waterproof, they won't really lose value. Replacing components like the fridge or water heater is pretty cheap and simple if you can come by the parts.
The author only count the interface that the user feel is not part of the action but obstruction between what to manipulate and what to accomplish.

If you consciously think that you have to use effort to control your eyes to see. Then, yes, to you your eyes are interface. To many others they probably don't think that way.
So, what's the trick to finding one? Bring a metal detector?
Can't tell if you're being sarcastic here.
Mario Mendoza Goes to SecTor
A recap of the 2012 SecTor conference in Toronto, Canada. Specifically, this blog post focuses on Risk I/O CEO's talk on the Security Mendoza Line.
This was done by the guys at Paravel. http://paravelinc.com/work/microsoft.php
The thing is, that the comet is not merely reflecting sunlight, as the moon does. It's also acting as a very large fluorescent light bulb as the gas boiling off it is stimulated to emit visible light by the sun's ultraviolet. While the comet itself is tiny, astronomically speaking, the light-emitting tail may be millions of mile long.

See: http://www.solarviews.com/eng/comet.htm
Why is HN so Slow Lately?
Has anyone else noticed this? At first I thought it was just a quirk in Safari on my iPhone, but I am seeing the same slowness on my work PC as well as at home.

HN is taking an average of 13.51 seconds to return from the initial GET request for a new page (over ten attempts, ~28KB / request). Every subsequent request is in the noise. It's making browsing the site tedious to the point where I hit "Next" and go to another tab.
Protecting Data Backup From Natural Threats
What steverb is pretty accurate here. I myself currently work in a .NET position. Most places around here, particularly healthcare companies, look for people familiar with .NET Framework. If you're doing web development, it's much the same, with a smattering of PHP (I've heard of a couple of Ruby positions available in the area, but there are very few.) It's a good opportunity to have consistent pay while you build an online presence/work on side projects if you're willing to go that route at the very least. Your mileage may vary, though.
Setting up social tracking for Google Analytics (a quick overview)
Two front page Hacker News posts and why one converted 20x higher
Thanks! I'm less interested in writing an actual emulator but more just interested in understanding your approach and the code in general at a high level..

But I will take a look! Thanks again for sharing your work
Redis 2.6 RC8 is out
Sorry to be redundant, but I REALLY want to stress on how annoying this is. A good alternative is to allow user to click elsewhere on the screen (other than the dialog) or press the escape key.
Best way to learn git is in the command line (get away from any GUI). And then play with repositories to see what the commands actually do.

"Don't mess with history"? I don't have to commit to my commits as long as my commits ain't public.

Rewriting history is a lie? Well, if you want to keep everything you do in history, maybe commit on each keystroke? That's insane.

Don't commit unless your ready to commit? Then that be hard to keep track of. Come time to commit you've got 50+ files modified good luck at doing decent commit messages.
An introduction to Cloud Haskell from the Haskell Implementors' Workshop in September:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jJ2paFuErM

Slides: http://www.haskell.org/wikiupload/4/46/Hiw2012-duncan-coutts...
+1. Give me KNOBS or give me death!

Take the infamous iDrive example. For all the good design that BMW puts into their cars, it all suddenly went out of the window when it came to software. It's like when the software engineers showed up, everyone else threw up their hands and said "take it away--we don't care how poorly usable it is, for it is 'cool' and that's what people want."

For example, if you wish to change a radio station to another preset, and you have the misfortune of being elsewhere in the touchscreen UI, you must first navigate to the Radio screen, then switch to Presets (working off slightly hazy memory here, so pardon inexactness if there is one). How is that better than just whacking the button for the preset # on the radio?

A must read-book for any techie, in my opinion, is "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper. It gave me a new perspective on computing. If you do any kind of software design that is used by a human, you must read it.

So that book starts out with "Riddles for the Information Age" and asks you what happens when you cross a computer with: an airplane, a camera, an alarm clock, a car, etc. As you might guess, the answer is that things did not go well.
x1 carbon owner checking in. screen is bright and matte so no glare issues. that said i certainly would not use it for serious photo editing or graphic work. however the keyboard plus trackpad are outstanding, plus you have the mouse nub if you hate trackpads. overall it's a very worthy alternative to a mba.
interesting point, but the mass of businesspeople are using linkedin, not google+. the quality of my network on LI is radically better than G+, for example, which pretty much keeps it mostly out of my life...
Creating a Twitter list for canadian startup thought leaders
The best I've used is Google's context sensitive spell check in Docs. It only returns one answer and in my experience is almost always right.
I keep meaning to go to some of the local user group meetings. Things keep getting in the way and I keep making excuses. Perhaps I'll do so this this month!
This would have been much more poignant had:

1) This been posted on October 12th

2) We were still discussing the anniversary of Jobs' death on that date.

As it is right now, of course people are discussing the death of Jobs and not Ritchie because people don't usually talk about the 358th day since someone's death.
You’re doing startup funding all wrong
Fitsat: A Small Artificial Satellite